It’s literally one of the oldest questions of all: “Are we alone in the universe?”
To the rational mind, based on the sheer size of the universe, it seems just about impossible to imagine that we are. However, until very recently we weren’t even sure if there were other planets out there. Perhaps the circumstances that allowed our rocky worlds and their bulky gaseous planetary siblings to take form was a fluke, a one in a trillion cosmic accident that was never repeated in all of time.
Fortunately, for those on the “No, we’re not alone!” school of thought the first extrasolar planet (one formed around a star other than our own) was identified in 1992. Since then, thanks to NASA and its Hubble and new James Webb space-based telescopes, along with the work of the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and a host of other sky-watching entities we have now catalogued more than 5,000 extrasolar planets, with hundreds more being spotted annually.
But what are they like? Based on the work of astronomers this growing family of orbiting worlds are apparently about as unique and dissimilar to our Earth (and each other) as they could be. Some are vast, some are tiny. Some are gas giants, and some are rocky worlds like ours – and some could even have water just like our blue green world.
To help visualize this astronomic assortment the creative minds at Halcyon Maps, under the direction of creative wizard Martin Vargic have created an artwork entitled: ‘The Exoplanet Zoo’ – to showcase the various sizes configurations and colors of these distant worlds. Each of the individual planets in the display is presented at scale; to show how different these worlds are from each other.
It's estimated that our own Milky Way Galaxy could be home to somewhere between 100 and 200 billion worlds – with the number of galaxies in the universe numbering upwards to two trillion – with each of them home to billions of planets. That’s a lot of real estate where life can take hold. Are we alone? Not likely, and here are a few places in our immediate cosmic neighborhood where it may already have taken root – and is staring back at us wondering the same question right this moment. #universe #extrasolarplanet #halcyonmaps #extrasolar #nasa